My son borrowed my mower in the spring and brought it back with a receipt taped to the handle like a joke because he’d had it serviced. We’re outside Terre Haute, Indiana. Forty-one dollars, blade sharpened, oil changed, at a small engine shop out on 41. I put the receipt in the drawer where I keep everything. In August I needed a part, so I called the shop and gave them my name so they could look up what model I had. The man said he had eleven tickets on me. I told him that wasn’t right because my son had only taken the mower in once.
He read them off. Going back to 2016, one or two a year — and they weren’t all mowers. There was a chainsaw, a tiller, and a generator, twice. I don’t own any of those things. I asked what address he had on the account, and he read me a road out past the airport. Then I asked if the same person always brought the equipment in. He said yes, the same fellow, and that he’d bought a lot from him over the years. I asked him what name was on the tickets, and he went quiet before reading it back to me.
It was my husband’s name. The same name that’s been on my account since 2016, even though my husband has been dead since 2019. I asked the man if he still had the old tickets and he said he did, including the customer’s signature. I drove out there with my son’s receipt and asked him to pull the most recent one. The signature looked enough like my husband’s that I couldn’t breathe for a minute. Then he pulled the ticket from 2016 and turned it around. On the back was a note from the mechanic: “Customer says wife doesn’t know about this place.”
